when "intercourse" got funny
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Nov 13 19:23:30 UTC 2006
In the Army, it was said that "There's always five percent who never
get the word." Perhaps swabbies are a bit swifter than GI's. :-(
-Wilson
On 11/13/06, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
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> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject: Re: when "intercourse" got funny
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A well-known principle, notably quoted by John F. Kennedy during the Missile Crisis (when Soviet MiGs scrambled to intercept a U-2 whose mission over Russia had supposedly been canceled due to the possibility that it could trigger WWIII), is "There's always some [doglike individual] who doesn't get the word." I found this quite by accident at a website [http://www.jeffreymaynard.com/Harrow_County/guestlog2003.htm] for alumni of Harrow (an all-boys' school, natch) in England: Quote from article in Gaytonian, December 1953, by George Thorn: "THE SCHOOL ORGAN It has been a great joy to us to see that work has at last been begun on the School Organ. For some seventeen years the erection of this Organ has been a dream." (No, I'm not making this up)
>
> Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh. He said, "Gaytonian."
>
> JL
>
>
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--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.
--Sam Clemens
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